Sixty years after World War II a story came to light of an ordinary German soldier named Gerhard M., who not only noted down all his impressions and experiences in a diary, but who also kept a photograph album containing all the snapshots he had taken during the war. This award-winning Russian documentary is based exclusively on his pictures and writings. Gerhard M. was sent with the German army to the Eastern front in 1940. He recorded his daily activities – finding food, the long hard winters, longing for home, the rounding up of Soviet partisans and Jews, their poverty and the punishments and shootings his battalion inflicted upon them – all through snapshots and notes in his private diary.